Moving the Dial on Customer Experience — Opening Remarks by Director of Horizontal Supervision, Patricia Dunne

For compliance teams, the signal is that conduct and consumer-protection expectations will increasingly be tested through the quality of customer journeys, complaints handling, vulnerable-customer treatment, and management information on outcomes. Firms should expect greater scrutiny of how board and senior management oversight translates into consistent customer outcomes across products and channels. Actionable steps include mapping key customer journeys, reviewing complaints and root-cause analysis, validating conduct-risk metrics, and ensuring customer-experience reporting reaches boards with clear accountability.

Firms should also assess whether digitalisation and process changes improve or obscure consumer understanding. The speech is not a new rule, but it reinforces the direction of supervisory engagement and raises reputational and conduct risk for firms with weak customer-outcome evidence. Institutions that can demonstrate robust customer-experience governance may gain trust and competitive advantage.

Urgency is medium: no immediate deadline is apparent, but firms should prepare for more thematic scrutiny.